Ben Paddon

Tag: Jonathan Coulton

  • An open letter to Whoever Winds Up Organising This Year’s “Rage Against The X-Factor” Campaign

    Dear loose confederacy of internet protestors,

    You did good last year. You managed to bring to a stop The X-Factor’s streak of inane UK Christmas Number Ones. I applaud you for that. But next year could you… I don’t know… maybe pick a different song?

    It’s not that I don’t appreciate your effort, and it’s not that I don’t like Rage Against The Machine (I don’t, but that’s besides the point), but it seems to me that you could use this as an opportunity to get an independent artist into the UK chart. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to discover that the Christmas #1 was Jonathan Coulton? Or Dan Bull? In fact “Thistopia” would make a perfect candidate for this year’s campaign. And it’s available to buy on iTunes. Perfect!

    It also amuses me that you were given the opportunity to send an anti-X-Factor message a couple of years ago when Malcolm Middleton released “We’re All Going To Die”, but I guess The X-Factor wasn’t such as nuisance then. For some reason.

    You’ve proven you have some kind of phenomenal cosmic power. That’s great. But maybe you could use it to send a message not just to The X-Factor but to the music industry as a whole. And the best way to do that is to throw your support behind an independent artist.

    Think about it.

    Kind regards,
    Ben Paddon

  • Presenting a new project: Ben Paddon’s Feeble Excuse

    I’m rather pleased to announce that after weeks of planning, (which themselves followed months of “Is this a good idea? Can I make it work? Will people be interested?”) I’m ready to lift the curtain on a project that will be going live next month:

    The premise for Ben Paddon’s Feeble Excuse is so simple it may actually leave you feeling insulted. Each week I will be interviewing someone who I admire or who has inspired me – an actor, a musician, a programmer, an artist, or perhaps someone you’ve never even heard of before – just because I want to. I’ll be chatting with them about what they do, and asking the sort of questions I haven’t heard answers to yet.

    One of the aims is to have a weekly podcast about 30 to 45 minutes in length that is hopefully a lot of fun to listen to. But the key aim, as implied by the title, is just to get a chance to chat with people I want to chat with.

    The show will be launching at the end of June and while I can’t reveal a full roster of interviewees for the first season just yet, I’m quite pleased to announce that the first episode will feature an interview with Jonathan Coulton. Why? Well, because I’ve wanted to talk to him for ages about, ooh, lots of things.

    The podcast is very kindly being sponsored by SoulGeek.com, who have politely asked me not to talk about the bodies they keep under the basement in their corporate headqu– oh, DAMMIT!